November 04, 2013

Tomorrow is election day and so it is important that you take a few minutes and exercise this right. We have seen too many people willing to die and even dying for this right as the Arab Spring swept through North Africa. Don't take it for granted. Go vote!! Tomorrow I will give you a few reflections on voting days past.

November 03, 2013

I don't know where I came across this quotation but I kind of like it. I just wikipediad (yes, I know that isn't a word) this guy and apparently he was a huge advocate of endurance running as well as an advocate for women as equal competitors when that was unusual. Kind of cool. That "run daily" is the same thing that Jeff Galloway said when I heard him speak before the Run for Virginia Wine. He said "run everyday even if only for 10 minutes". I wonder if I could do that...I wonder if it would keep me from going into these funks where I can't get out the door. I set a mileage goal for the month -- it is high. I am counting time on feet both running and walking: 130 miles. It will definitely be a stretch. I hope I can do it.

French Nougat This stuff is amazing. I first discovered it in a tasting box from the now defunct petit amuse and had to have more and so I contacted Dedier. He could not have been nicer and soon had some nougat on its way to my house but if you are feeling ambitious, he shared his recipe with food and wine. Check it out, I want this guy to be successful so this little taste of heaven is easier to come by.

French knives I bought a couple of these to keep in my winery bag, my purse, my desk at work. They are the perfect paring knife for slicing cheese or fruit and they are easy to tuck into a pocket or bag without worrying about cutting yourself. If you can't tell from the picture, the blade folds up and locks in the handle.

November 02, 2013

What's complicated, you ask? It is my relationship with running (or jogging if you will). I am currently training for my fourth half marathon. Every time I say that I have to go back in my head and list them -- it is only three that I have completed and yet I cant fathom that I have really done that. Then my eternal voice discounts the feat by saying something like "OK, so you finished three half marathons, but you don't run the whole thing and you are slow". What is that about? I can rarely mention to someone else that I do these races without mentioning that I am super slow, without discounting this feat. I have a mantra that I repeat in my head (usually on out and back races as just a wee bit into the race those fast runners are already on their way back and passing me) "Each to their own ability". I am telling myself not to compare myself with these fast runners and yet I still discount my own performance.

Maybe it is my own like/hate relationship with running. Another mantra I found myself repeating on one long hill slog early in this adventure I call running was "you never regret the run once you are done." Hmm, what does that say about before and during?

So back to my 4th half marathon. I paid for my registration, I booked my over priced hotel room and in one short week I will be flying down to Savannah, GA. I am really doing this and for the first time I was going to have more then 8 weeks to train. For the first 6 weeks I logging my long runs each weekend, every weekday morning the alarm would go off at 4:40 in hopes that three days a week I will fit in some morning mileage (and I have been averaging 2 or 3 short runs a week). But like most of my training, it is hard for me to keep up the intensity once those long runs reach the 9 mile mark. I didn't make the 10 mile long run, I just made excuses to myself and then a week had gone by -- so I planned on 11 for that next week but I had taken a week off -- the run started out slow, hard and I only made it 10.25 before calling it a day. Next Saturday I will run Rock 'n' Roll Savannah. Pretty sure I am signing up for New Orleans again this year too...you see, it's complicated.

November 01, 2013

It is November, a month that marks my birth. The days are short and getting shorter and yet the farmers here in Virginia are not quite ready to end their forays to the city's farmers' markets. The last of the harvest is coming in and they begin to clean up the fields and plant a cover crop and move into the high tunnels. The leaves are still clinging to the trees in bright colors in these early days of November and by the end of the month there will be the few lone brown crinkled leaves refusing to make the descent to the ground.

In the kitchen, everyone is obsessesd with cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger and calling it pumpkin...oh and the soups shift to stews and the vegetables are once again going into the oven to be roasted. Squash, dark greens and sweet potatoes replace the zucchini, tomatoes and eggplants of late summer. Meals become heartier and it is hard to find balance in the season of eating.

Once again, despite a crazy social schedule for at least the first half of the month, I am going to try and move beyond just writing for myself and share a few of those stories with interwebs. Welcome to National Blog Posting Month: November 2013.

A bathing suit and it goes in the carry-on luggage. I also keep one in the glove box of my car. More than once in my life I have found myself wanting a bathing suit and not having one but I think where this habit started was when I was much younger and used to use my dad's employee pass privileges to travel it was possible to have many hours between flights and we would sneak off to an airport hotel for a little swim to kill the time.

A corkscrew. This can come in quite handy in expensive cities for having a little wine in the hotel room and it doesn't take up much room. But if you are traveling by plane it must go in your checked luggage.

While we are speaking of things to put in the checked luggage. I recently started carrying these picnic knives with me every where. They are infinitely useful.

Reading this might include magazines that I can leave behind as well as a book or two depending on how long the trip is for. I spent 7 months in Bogota without any English reading materials so this gained importance then.

Healthy snacks These often include fruit, trail mix, nuts, vegetables. Healthy things to eat on the plane and when there isn't a chance to stop for food.

Sunblock when you are as fish belly white as I am this is an important thing to remember especially since I have sensitive skin and am pick about what brands I use.

My laptop for this very reason I have been considering an i pad but then wonder if maybe some other tablet is more compatible with everything else I use...must do some research.

April 06, 2013

Tomorrow I will run the Cherry Blossom 10 miler with 15,000 other people. It will be hard (long distance running always is). I will finish. The weather is supposed to be beautiful and the cherry blossoms are supposed to be at peak bloom. To that end, I had best head to bed.

April 05, 2013

I attended a wine club member pick up party this evening at Blenheim Vineyards and realized that for all the good intentions and photos taken, I have still not added this winery to my Virginia Wine page. I need to do that write up. Not to mention a whole bunch of others.

I am running the Cherry Blossom 10 miler Sunday and really don't feel that I have run much (and definitely not put in a long run) since my last half marathon in February 6 weeks ago. No matter what I will set a personal record (PR) since I have never run this distance before. I am just going to take it slow and not get injured.

I am running another 10 mile race two weeks later (The George Washington Parkway Classic). I wonder if there is a two week training plan that I should follow?

I better figure something out as far as exercise goes because the next couple of weeks are full of food events and apparently I think it is a good idea to go to all of them. My justification was missing the Paris trip...

Missing that trip leaves me still needing to take a real vacation this year. I need to start planning.

I am tempted to sign up for another half marathon and yet I am barely running. I need to get re-motivated. The state of Oregon keeps coming up and I wonder should I go out for the Wine Country Half again this year...can I finally train and make my goal time? I wish I was running the Virginia Wine Country Half Marathon. Maybe because it was my first, I wonder it I should be looking into that?

I can't wait to go biking. With the weather finally warming up, I am pretty excited about it.

Apparently my lack of exercise over the past three days while visiting family is weighing on me.

I have about 5 knitting projects that I want to start but have felt like I should finish up some others first and feeling uninspired (or unwilling to solve the problem that led me to leave them in the first place) I don't knit but wish that I was. This is an easy problem to solve. Start the new project.

April 04, 2013

Several years ago when I was participating in my first Eat Local Challenge, I had had a particularly stressful day and was thinking maybe a cocktail was in order. I went down to my local ABC store (that is the Alcoholic Beverage Control for those of you who don't live in the Old Dominion) and started looking through the shelves -- no tequila, that's from Mexico, Rye is from Canada, and Vodka, well Russia or Scandinavia but not Virginia --wait -- is that Virginia Gentleman? Surely that is made in Virginia. Then I carefully read the label...hmm, distilled in Kentucky, finished in Virginia. Surely that wasn't really a local product. Well, the A. Smith Bowman Distillery seems to have a few other tricks up their sleeve in addition to refining Kentucky Sour Mash Distillate.

Welcome to the A. Smith Bowman distillery. Oh wait, this is going on the internet? cover your faces. (and yes, my sister knew I would put up both pictures.) The neicelets are home schooled and see the twin in the blue dress? She wants to be a chemist when she grows up. Well, a chemist or else she wants to sell snow cones. These things are hard to decide at 5. (Mom is encouraging both interests as long as that snow cone truck will pay her way through college...organic chem doesn't come cheap these days.) What better place for a field trip to show chemistry at work. So, they jumped in the trusty mini van (Aunt Jas in tow) and headed up to Fredricksburg, VA to the site of the old FMC Corp Cellophane plant. (Oh, and a former superfund site...apparently cellophane production is some toxic stuff.

The tour started out with a basic definition of bourbon.

An American made product

made from a grain mixture that is at least 51% corn

aged in new charred oak barrels

There are some other stipulations about the proof of the drink at given stages of the process that go into the definition as well. I had no idea that the smokey flavor (and for that matter the color) came from burnt wood. Interesting. Next we met Mary, their copper still.

Apparently a copper still of her size is quite unusual. Most of the distillers only line their stainless steel stills with copper. (Copper being important to remove sulfur from the ethyl alcohol which eventually cause the need for repairs due to erosion for an entirely copper still. Repairs are necessary about every 8 years). Basically ethyl alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water and collects in the ball pictured above and then condenses in the coils. They only use the middle part of the distillation process referred to as the heart, as this is the best flavor. This middle part of the process is determined by human tasters. As subjective as that sounds they are way more accurate than any machine (which can only taste to parts per billion while the average human can taste to parts per trillion -- or at least that is what the tour guide said).

Eventually the bourbon is barrelled and left to age for 7 years. During this process quite a bit of volume can be lost 3-7% per year. So the more it is aged, the less it yields. The barrel aging room was stacked floor to ceiling.

The bottling and packing was a small corner of the main room -- a two person job. Small batch production is quite evident when you realize how manageable the whole production is and they only have 10 employees and two of them are giving tours. Last there was a wee little taste...has me thinking of an old fashioned, even now.

April 03, 2013

The sun has been out and trying to herald in this cool and rainy spring, asking apologies for the the late March snow. I am left craving green, craving FRESH, craving light flavors. I haven't been to the farmer's market in a month or two (vegetable delivery rocks!) and I know there isn't much in season that hasn't been forced in a green house or hoop houses...but I have been crazing craving nonetheless. As the spring warmth makes you want to clear out the cobwebs of winter, I have been trying to focus on cooking from the pantry...maybe you have a cabinet like this...

full of bottles (there are another two rows behind what you can see and then a few others elsewhere) ...some are used regularly and others less so. Forgotten after whatever recipe they were bought for, like the bottle of bulgur, right there front and center, what can I do with that? Wait, didn't I just pin a recipe for that? ah the FRESH tastes of tabouli. Now this isn't extremely local for this time of year but life is about balance -- what is it they say 80/20? This is one of those 20% meals.

April 02, 2013

Back in January, when the year was FRESH and everyone was talking about resolutions and goals, I mentioned that I wanted to rediscover some of the outdoor activities that I have gotten away from since moving back to the city. One of these is hiking. So in true "Jasmine go big or go home" form, I decided to start the year's hiking off with the best hike in the state...and likely one of the most difficult, Old Rag Mountain.

It was the beginning of March and they were calling for the temperature to be 30 degrees at the top of the mountain. This is a good day for this type of climb. Not too cold and icy but cold enough to keep the crowds away. Nothing like standing in line for half an hour to scramble up the next rock out cropping. A group of about 18 of us set off from the lower parking lot. I have never been much for hiking in large groups but if it was going to get me out there, maybe it wouldn't be too bad.

The hike starts out with gentle switch backs. The trail wasn't too muddy and had frost heaves along the trail which is much desirable to sheets of ice. Soon the trail tuns to rock scrambles and false summits as you go up and down over the rocks usually with three points of contact. It is fun and it is difficult. Let me show you. (click to make image bigger)

We ate just below the summit and then stopped at the top only long enough for photos (the wind was blowing up there and it was cold). We took an easier trail down that ends with 2 and a half miles of fire road and another mile or so back to the cars. I have to say these 10 or so miles left me more tired than the New Orlean's Rock 'n' Roll Half Marathon that I had done the weekend before. I can't wait to get back out there.